It’s Official: The New Yorker Nick Denton Profile is Really Almost Here This Time

October 10, 2010

The local internet’s most anticipated New Yorker article for the week of October 18, 2010, is set for release online whenever the interns finish formatting it for the web. We told you last Friday that Ben McGrath’s profile of Gawker Media boss Nick Denton was coming soon and an online press release today confirms it: “In the October 18, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, in ‘Search and Destroy’ (p. 50), Ben McGrath profiles Nick Denton, the father of Gawker Media.” Nick Denton has already taken to his Facebook to refute the portrayal of him in the magazine.

In the collective media mind, there exists a caricature of Denton as an “evil, soulless, Machiavellian puppeteer: the Wizard of Blogs,” McGrath writes. A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, tells McGrath, “The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true…. It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.” McGrath writes that Denton “bores easily, having been proved right often enough to dismiss most attempts at debate with an insensitivity that is commonly mistaken for meanness.” He “is a bit of a sphinx on purpose,” Joel Johnson, the longest-serving Gizmodo writer, tells McGrath. “He has some of the attributes of the dork who wraps his Asperger’s around him like a cloak.”

Juicy enough pull quotes, if you’re into this sort of thing!

Allegedly nicknamed “‘Dick Nenton’ for his ambition and aggressive networking,” the man says he’s not even a threat to traditional media:

“I think of us as being a little like the friendly barbarians,” Denton tells McGrath. “We’re the barbarians who can actually–probably–be hired to defend your gates.”